Humanoid robots compete on the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, China.
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The heat of the continued AI boom has spread to a notoriously difficult area of hardware – humanoid robotics. Forbes has learned that two Silicon Valley firms, each with greater than $100 million in funding, have secretly developed human-shaped machines that they hope will someday have the ability to perform tasks normally performed by humans.
The first company, Palo Alto-based Rhoda AI, raised a $162.6 million Series A funding round in April, bringing its total funding to $230 million and valuing the corporate at nearly $1 billion, in accordance with Pitchbook. The company is working on a “general-purpose bimanual manipulation platform,” colloquially often known as a dual-armed humanoid robot, in accordance with documents seen by Forbes. The company has told people who one among its key innovations is a humanoid able to lifting heavy loads, a source accustomed to the corporate’s plans said Forbes. Heavy lifting is a critical task in lots of industrial environments, and most of the humanoid robots known today struggle to lift greater than 50 kilos while maintaining balance and stability.
Founded by Jagdeep Singh, who was the founder and CEO of Quantumscape (market cap: $9.65 billion) and Infinera, which was acquired by Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2024, and has been working on Rhoda since 2024, in accordance with his LinkedIn. According to the documents, other members of the founding team include Stanford professor Gordon Wetzstein and Vincent Clerc, who worked on Softbank’s humanoid robot Pepper. Rhoda declined to comment.
The second company is “full-stack robotics” company Genesis AI, which raised a $105 million seed round earlier this yr from investors including Khosla Ventures and Eric Schmidt. Documents seen by Forbes show how the corporate is developing a humanoid robot that has two arms but wheels as an alternative of legs. Genesis AI hopes to bring robots to market cheaper, lighter and fewer dangerous than other humanoids in development, comparable to Tesla’s Optimus robot.
Zhou Xian, CEO of Genesis AI, clarified that the corporate is working with hardware providers to construct customized robots moderately than constructing humanoids from scratch. The startup focuses totally on training software models that drive them, he said.
Genesis AI and Rhoda AI join a gaggle of early-stage startups which have raised significant funding to create humanoid robots that might be used for industrial use cases on factory floors or for household tasks like folding laundry. They’ve change into a hot area of investment recently: humanoid maker Figure AI announced in September that it had raised over $1 billion at a valuation of $39 billion. Other well-funded competitors include Tesla, which makes a humanoid robot called Optimus, and 1X, which is reportedly raising $1 billion.
Even though the sphere continues to be in its infancy, there’s plenty of pleasure: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this yr that humanoid robots are “potentially one of the largest industries of all time,” and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said he believes the Optimus humanoid robot division will ultimately be the most dear a part of Tesla, although the corporate has thus far only very Few of the robots have been manufactured and the department reportedly faced significant development and production challenges.
However, other investors proceed to warn that the space might not be ready for commercialization yet.
“After the success of large language models, investors are optimistic about robotics as the next big thing, and that’s creating a lot of hype,” said Kane Hsieh, general partner at Root Ventures, who invests in hardware startups. “But the part that feels strange is the transition from cool, promising research to $100 million seed rounds.”
